Category: Crap For Brains

These two ‘intellectuals’ figure that violating individual rights doesn’t matter as long as the total society get to where they believe it should be.
Absolute utilitarian communism. The individual doesn’t matter.
Intellectuals have caused more problems in this world because they’re actually overeducated morons.

Faculty member Philip Swenson and Dustin Crummett ’12 were never at William & Mary at the same time, but their connection has now been forged in print.

Swenson, an assistant professor of philosophy at W&M since the fall of 2017, met Crummett while the two were at Notre Dame a few years back. Later, they ran into each other at a conference and started discussing their thoughts on a certain argument on gun control and self-defense.

That conversation resulted in their co-authored paper, “Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to All,” which was recently published in the philosophy journal Ergo.

Crummett earned his Ph.D. from Notre Dame in 2018 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He works on animal ethics as part of a European Research Council project on animals in the philosophy of the Islamic world.

“Philip had been thinking about an argument from Caspar Hare, a philosopher at MIT, and how it might undermine an argument against gun control, which has been defended by Michael Huemer and some other people,” Crummett said.

“Huemer’s argument is supposed to show, roughly, that gun control violates the individual’s right to self-defense, even if it saves lives on balance. I suggested that we co-author a paper about it, so we did. We presented it at the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in Chicago in 2018, as well as at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress that year.”

Huemer’s argument claims that even if a particular gun control measure has good results overall, it infringes, in a manner which is prima facie seriously wrong, the rights of those who end up being killed or significantly harmed due to their resultant inability to defend themselves, according to the paper’s abstract.

“We claim that uncertainty on the part of the government about who will be harmed by a particular gun control measure underwrites a strong response to this argument,” it continues.

“If gun control measures save lives on balance, then they may increase each person’s chance of remaining safe relative to the information available to the government, even if they will cause some people to be harmed who otherwise would not have been.”

Swenson had connected some of his reading on the self-defense argument against gun control with Hare’s writings on examples of people having to make decisions without knowing beforehand whom they’re saving and whom they are killing, he said.

“There’s this argument against gun control that goes like this: Look, even if say, some gun control policy would save more lives overall, that doesn’t mean it would be OK to do because you might still be violating important rights,” Swenson said. “And the right to self-defense might be one of those very important rights.”

Swenson gave an example where a person being attacked by a mob armed with baseball bats has their gun grabbed from their hands, leaving them defenseless. He likens that to the government implementing a restrictive gun control policy that would keep people from having firearms at the ready, Swenson said.

“And then the argument goes like this: It’s often wrong to violate people’s rights even if you make things better overall,” Swenson said. “It’s not OK to just do whatever makes things better overall; you have to also take into account people’s rights. So you might think the gun ban would have to make things way, way better in order to justify violating people’s rights. So the burden of proof on defenders of a gun control policy would become much higher.”

The pair took it a step further.

“The idea Dustin and I were trying to develop is that in particular types of cases where you’re acting in everyone’s best interest given your information at the time, you don’t have to worry about rights in the same sort of way,” Swenson said.

He gave an example of a doctor trying to decide about giving a patient a treatment with a 90% chance of saving his or her life, or a 10% chance an adverse reaction would be fatal. Most would agree that the overriding factor of survival precludes worrying about violating rights.

“So in cases where you’re acting in everyone’s best interests or the people involved’s best interests, you can sort of ignore this risk of violating their rights,” Swenson said.

The authors argue that the same is true with gun control; the government can consider beforehand what gives each person the best chance to survive. Though a very few might not survive because they won’t have a weapon at hand when needed to avoid dire peril, for most it will be best not to have it available.

“They could say well, what gives each citizen a better chance?” Swenson said. “If passing the gun control measure gives them a better chance, then we don’t have to worry about violating the rights; we can just give them their best shot to survive and pass the gun control law.”

This is not the Babylon Bee (a satire site if you’ve never read it)
These idjits are real people, mentally defective, but real.
Remember, as you’re reading this, they want a police free city, but still want police. They can’t make up their minds.

Imagine that you were asked to help create stability in a newly-founded city. How would you try to solve the problems that your friends and neighbors encountered? How would you respond to crisis and violence? Would your *first* choice be an unaccountable army with a history of oppression and violence patrolling your neighborhood around the clock?

— from Enough is Enough: A 150-Year Performance Review of the Minneapolis Police Department

What makes a community healthy and safe? This document doesn’t have all the answers, but it acknowledges that for many of us, police are not part of the solution. Patterns of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and bullying are too common. When someone is having a mental health crisis, or when neighbors are concerned about a fellow neighbor, or when we feel unsafe– are the police our only option? Of course, different communities have different needs. Vibrant, dynamic, and police-free communities aren’t going to be created by outside groups– they’re going to bloom from the soil that already exists in those spaces. What we can share here, though, is what that process has looked like elsewhere. Here are a few tools, ideas, and strategies:

1. An easy one: STOP calling the police when it’s clearly unnecessary.
We can’t tell you to never call the police (though some do make that choice). We can challenge you, however, to reflect on that choice, to make sure that calling them isn’t an automatic response to each and every moment of personal discomfort or uncertainty. Never forget: an inconvenience for one person, once police are involved, can become a death sentence for another person.

2. Get trained in first aid, crisis de-escalation, restorative justice, etc.
The more skills we have to share with our neighbors and family, the less we have to rely on unaccountable armed paramilitary forces! Find or organize local trainings, and share that knowledge.

3. Build community all the time, not just in times of trouble.
It isn’t just about building capacity as individuals; it’s about cultivating resilient communities. One of the first steps we can take toward communities that no longer need police is meeting one another. We can know our neighbor’s names. We can hold potlucks, volunteer to help our neighbors with simple things like shoveling snow or carrying groceries, and build real relationships. That way, when crises happen, we have other resources to call upon besides the police.

As Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Toolkit puts it: It can be as simple as asking a friend a basic question: “If I needed to, could I call you?” or telling someone “If you ever needed someone, you could call me.” We know that this is nothing like a perfect solution. But we have to begin to try out what solutions might work, especially because know that calling the police doesn’t.

4. If you DO need police, go to them instead of calling them to you.
From the zine, “12 Things to Do Instead of Calling the Cops:” If something of yours is stolen and you need to file a report for insurance or other purposes, consider going to the police station instead of bringing cops into your community. You may inadvertently be putting someone in your neighborhood at risk.

5. With mental health crises, remember to center the person in crisis.
From the article “5 Ways to Help Someone in a Mental Health Emergency Without Calling the Police” (Tastrom):

Remember that the person having the mental health crisis is a person and their wishes should be followed as much as is safe. The best intervention strategies will be things that the person buys into and does voluntarily. Those of us with mental health issues have likely been traumatized by doctors and other practitioners not listening to us or doing things against our will. All of this is contextual and there are no absolutes, but think about trauma when you are considering what actions to take.

6. Make a list of local services/hotlines you can call instead of the police.
From domestic abuse crisis centers, to shelters for people experiencing homelessness, to mental health support groups, to a range of other kinds of advocates and service-providers, find the people who can deal with the kinds of crises that police so often are not equipped to handle. Find out which ones involve the police as a matter of protocol, and which ones don’t. Hang the list on your refrigerator. Keep those contacts in your phone. Make copies and give them to friends and neighbors.

7. Support organizations that really do keep our communities healthy.
On that note: where these services exist, support them, whether by volunteering, donating, or lobbying for funding from city/county/etc. government. Some great alternatives to the police already exist; they’re just often extremely underfunded. Take this a step further: how might we strategically re-allocate resources from police to services that truly help people? Campaigns to divest from police while investing in communities may offer a path forward.

8. Zoom in and find solutions where you are.
Across the country, activists are finding ways to change the narrative and do this work. Teachers and parents are working on campaigns like Dignity in Schools’ “Counselors Not Cops.” LGBTQ groups are disinviting police to Pride parades. Formerly-incarcerated people are organizing networks of mentorship and even unarmed community mediation teams. Organizations like the Sex Workers Outreach Project are working to address stigma and criminalization. Churches are pledging to not call the police. From the decriminalization of drugs, to the dismantling of the school-to-prison pipeline, to abolishing ICE, and beyond– every step gets us closer to a police-free future.

9. Engage in policy work that can prevent, rather than just punish, crime.
When we ask people “what keeps your community healthy and safe?” the answers we hear are often very similar: affordable housing, jobs, youth programs, opportunities to create and experience art, welcoming parks, etc. We can cultivate safer and healthier neighborhoods by getting involved in activist organizations, neighborhood groups, school boards, etc. that have the power to do this preventative work.

10. Dream bigger: there was a time before police, and there will be a time after.
Some of the solutions we need don’t exist yet. There are some things we can do now, but this work is also about planting seeds. A vital first step toward a police-free future is simply being able to visualize what that future will look like. We must break out of the old mindset that police are this inevitable, irreplaceable part of society. They aren’t. There are better ways for us to keep our communities healthy and safe, ways that do not include the violent, oppressive, unaccountable baggage of police forces. Check out the various sources mentioned here. Do more research, have more conversations, and help build the world in which you want to live.

Well, the idjit is not called ‘Mad Maxine’ for nothing. And ‘insurrection’ is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as a event the federal government has been given the power to deal with. So Maxie may just have shot herself in the foot.

In the wake of inner city looting and rioting across America, including destruction of people’s businesses and property, as well as violence against police and everyday Americans, Democratic rep. Maxine Waters has decreed that the use of the term ‘rioting’ is racist.

In an interview with The Cut, Waters seriously contended that the term “rioting” constitutes “negative language used far too often in a description of black people by folks who fundamentally don’t see black people the same way they see whites and others.”

“A lot of negative language gets used against black people, describing what whites often believe is true about us: that language includes ‘lazy,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘rioting,’” Waters added.

Waters explained that she prefers to label the rioting as “insurrection”.

“I said ‘insurrection’. People acting out of frustration and hopelessness and understanding that they don’t have an establishment — political or otherwise — that really cared about their ability to work or have good health care. Yes, I choose to call it an insurrection.” Waters declares.

Hillary Clinton’s former national press secretary, Brian Fallon, called “for police departments to be defunded across the country,” reports The Hill. Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles, which recently witnessed violence and looting, is planning to partly defund its police department. The staunchly progressive city plans to cut its police department budget by $150 million. As Adam Ford notes:

Mayor Eric Garcetti announced an enormous transfer of city funds at a press briefing Wednesday, with $100 million to $150 million being stripped from the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget and reallocated to “black communities and communities of color.” … “It is time to move our rhetoric towards action to end racism in our city,” the mayor said.

L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez on Wednesday then officially introduced the motion, tweeting that it was “to cut funding to the LAPD, as we reset our priorities in the wake of the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & the #BlackLivesMatter call that we all support to end racism. This is just one small step.

The motion begins by condemning U.S. society as inherently racist, saying:

“American society is founded on a racial hierarchy, one that is born out of slavery, followed by Jim Crow segregation and corporate abuse of labor. As such, police departments are asked to enforce a system of laws that are designed to reinforce and maintain economic and racial inequality. … [W]e can begin by slowly dismantle [sic] those systems that are designed to harm people of color.”

It wasn’t enough to throw Molotov cocktails into squad cars or hurl recently-bought, pristine bricks at the backs of cops’ heads or through the windows of their precincts.

Now we must “Defund the Police” as well.

That along with a new call-and-response-on-your-knees demonstration of white fealty to blacks (cf. Bethesda, Md. and West Hollywood, Calif.) are the most recent tropes in our ongoing, Robespierre-like societal suicide.

The truth is that nearly everything that is declared as righteous or politically correct by our liberal/progressive elites (for ten minutes, anyway) and then trumpeted as such by the media is the reverse. It is usually a horrendous idea.

Nothing is more so than “Defund the Police.”

Well, not completely. It’s a perfectly good idea for Hollywood celebrities (many of whom back it in a big way) and high-level corporate execs who almost always have their own well-trained 24-hour personal security forces armed with the latest high-tech gizmos that would be the envy of El Chapo.

What do they care about those working-class non-entities aka the police? They’re for the hoi polloi, the ignorant masses..

Of course, those same hoi polloi are you and me and, especially, the disadvantaged communities where the vast amount of crime occurs.

What happens when a single mother’s four-year-old in Compton gets wounded in a crossfire between gangs? Who does she call to get help that it won’t happen again? LeBron James’ chief of security?

There are dozens of possible examples. I could go on, but the point is too obvious—defunding the police hugely harms the very people it’s supposed to help.

So why is it proposed? The only conclusion I can think of is that it’s part of a propaganda campaign whose goal is not just putting Donald Trump out of office, but ultimately overthrowing the state.

This would be achieved via the media and elites—whether they realize it or not, but inspired by their own Trump hatred—making inadvertent common cause with Antifa, the recently surfaced Boogaloo (whoever they are), and a whole host of socialist, communist, anarchist and other radical actors working together or separately.

The irony is that—were they to succeed—another form of police would take over that would make the current version seem like the mildest of social workers out of an afternoon Hallmark special. NKVD, anyone?

Was any of this, will any of this, be to the betterment of the actual lives of African-Americans? Don’t be ridiculous. They are beside the point. They are a prop.

Indeed, looked at from any angle, thanks to the intersection of COVID and the murder of George Floyd, a massive cloud has fallen over America—and it isn’t from tear gas or smoke bombs.

Emotions rule over intellect as never in our lifetimes. Race is being exploited as never before. In the old days it really was a problem. Now it is, largely, an illusion exploited for reasons of power and control. Racism must be fanned, even where it doesn’t exist, especially when it doesn’t exist, in order to take that control.

But this is about murder, and murder is the most dastardly of acts. We don’t even need the Ten Commandments to tell us that.

Nevertheless, why exactly did this white cop kill this black man? We don’t really know. Was it because of race? It’s a good possibility, but there are several other conceivable motivations. Apparently they knew each other. We may never know the truth in the current hysteria.

But even if we assume—as the media and our liberal friends do—that it has to be race, such a murder by a cop is an extremely rare occurrence, and one that has become increasingly rare over the years. You wouldn’t know that watching CNN, or almost anyone else for that matter.

We are in the middle of racist epidemic, they tell us. And it is your fault. I bet you didn’t know that. How ignorant you are.

Now repeat after me….

Defunding a police department is a strange thing for a city to do right after it suffered vandalism and looting.

It will also harm minorities. Wealthy white people may be able to afford private security guards, but poor minority people cannot. They have to rely on the police for protection. That is why most people of all races oppose defunding the police in public opinion polls, even as Black Lives Matter activists have called for defunding the police. “Only 16% of Americans favor cutting funding for police departments,” notes the Cato Institute. A Yahoo/​Yougov survey found that only 12% of whites, 33% of blacks, and 17% of Hispanics favor cutting funding for police departments.

It is disproportionately minorities who are victimized by violent crime, which is often black-on-black. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that 45% of murder victims and 47% of murderers in 2018 were African-American, even though blacks make up only 13% of the U.S. population (less than half of murder victims and murderers are white).

Cutting police funding will leave the police without the manpower needed to investigate and arrest many criminals. When that happens, it is disproportionately minorities themselves who will suffer. It is often harder and more time-consuming to track down and arrest murderers in poor minority neighborhoods, where witnesses may fear retaliation or being viewed as “snitches.”

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones attempted to justify the ruthless rioting terrorizing American cities Tuesday by claiming simply, “property can be replaced.”

“Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” Hannah-Jones said on CBS News. “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”

“To use the exact same language to describe those two things I think really, it’s not moral to do that. So yes, I think any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other peoples’ property but these are not reasonable times,” Hannah-Jones added.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Vladimir Duthiers offered no pushback and even applauded her deranged analysis.

“It’s a great point that you make, Nikole,” Duthiers said.

At the end of the piece, the Times pinned the article with a note that reads, “A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.”

The note also links to a broader 500-word “update” to the project included seven months after publication, during which the legacy paper pushed the collection of essays to be included in classroom curriculums. This update from the Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein concedes, “We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.”

While the two-word error might seem small, it is in fact significant given the Times’ aggressive mission to implement the papers in American classrooms to pin the nation’s origins on the practice of slavery which has been extinct in this country for more than 150 years. The project has since become emblematic of a broader Left-wing movement to paint the United States as an irredeemable breeding ground of white supremacy contributing to the rise of angry mobs terrorizing the very country that has in reality has stood as a beacon of individual liberty and inalienable rights.

Watch this short documentary debunking the historical fallacies of the 1619 Project here.

President Trump has promised to quell the violent attack on our country, and said: “Where there is no safety, there is no future.” He is correct.

Never before in our country’s history have our elected officials – officials who have taken an oath to uphold our laws and pledged to keep us safe – stood aside and let rioters destroy our communities. It is unconscionable, it is reckless and it will be very, very costly to repair.

In a “virtual roundtable” with several Democrat mayors of cities under siege, Joe Biden said he believed the terrible death of George Floyd, captured on a video seen by millions, was a turning point for the nation. “The blinders have been taken off”, the presumptive Democrat nominee said, “People are ready for real institutional change.”

The former vice president, somewhat scrambled by his habitual word salad, appeared to suggest that tackling “systemic racism” would require that, among other things, minority communities be given better access to capital with which to start businesses; further on in his comments he stressed the importance of small businesses.

Yes, investment in minority communities is essential to their prosperity; it is also impossible without firm law enforcement. History tells us so.

That’s why the tragedy is not that luxury stores on Rodeo Drive or Madison Avenue are being vandalized and Louis Vuitton handbags carried off by greedy criminals, though those acts are despicable. The tragedy is that poor black neighborhoods, already ravaged by COVID-19, have been ransacked, destroying stores, livelihoods and dreams.

The former can and will be rebuilt; the latter may never recover.

A look back at Ferguson, Mo., where riots broke out in 2014 because of the fatal cop shooting of Michael Brown, suggests just how tough rebuilding can be. The Wall Street Journal reported last summer on the fifth anniversary of those protests that unemployment in the St. Louis suburb was 5.5 percent compared to 3.3 percent in St. Louis County, while the poverty rate was 23 percent, compared to 10 percent in the region.

Crime in the city is higher than in most neighboring towns and worse than in 90 percent of other U.S. cities.

Small-business revenue in the community, five years out, was down by roughly 50 percent.

And that is in spite of considerable new investment in Ferguson.

A devastated block of West Florissant Avenue, where the unarmed teen was shot, now hosts a new $12 million Boys and Girls Club, and the Urban League built a job training center on another burned-out block. But the bulk of new investment has gone into wealthier white neighborhoods…………

Joe Biden never mentioned how he would restore order. He cannot. He desperately needs the support of African-American voters, and is tainted by his association with the 1994 Crime Bill, which many see as having resulted in the mass incarceration of blacks.

If elected, Biden would not help create the environment where small firms can flourish and opportunity can grow. Joe Biden would be exactly the wrong person at the helm.

Joe Biden can best capitalize on the rioting following the death of George Floyd in the same way he can best capitalize on anything in 2020: by keeping quiet and out of sight. Unfortunately for Biden, he does occasionally show up and say things. And then this happens: He suggests that police should be trained that, if cops rushed by unarmed person, they could “shoot them in the leg instead of the heart is a very different thing.”

This is bad advice that would get people killed. Police do have a variety of tools of non-deadly force at their disposal (tasers, rubber bullets, etc.), although some of those, too, can be deadly in some circumstances. Floyd, after all, was killed by a man’s knee. But anyone who has been trained in police work or the military could tell you: Firing a gun is always potentially deadly force. You shoot for center mass, to kill, or you don’t shoot at all. If you’re not prepared to kill someone, you should not even point a loaded gun at them, much less fire it. If you don’t have grounds to shoot to kill, you don’t have grounds to shoot.

There are all kinds of things that can go wrong by trying to shoot to wound, because most people are not expert marksmen, and even expert marksmen do not have the greatest of aim in chaotic circumstances. You can miss, and the person you’re shooting at isn’t stopped. You can miss, and hit and kill an innocent bystander. You can hit someone in an artery, and they bleed to death. You can be thinking “shoot to wound,” but the second radio car responding to the scene rolls out thinking “firefight in progress” and opens both barrels.

The police sometimes shoot people they shouldn’t, but this is the wrong way to try to change that. (If anything, studies have not supported the claim that police shootings are racially disproportionate; there may be a stronger claim for racial disparities in the use of other forms of force, as in Floyd’s case). One thing police training gets right, though, is that it draws a clear line around firing your gun only when you are prepared to kill. Blurring that line is only going to make things worse.

Within days footage emerged of rioters looting a Nike store, which is undoubtedly one of several that have been targeted over the last few days.

There’s an added layer of irony to the footage when you consider the fact that Nike used Colin Kaepernick, the face of the “take a knee” campaign, for its 2018 commercial in which Kaepernick asserted, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything. Just Do It.”

A news editor for a small, independent newspaper was in support of the protests-turned-riots, until they broke into the paper’s office and she had to take cover from looters and vandals in the basement.

Leigh Tauss, an editor for the progressive news outlet Indy Week in North Carolina, was stunned to find that the protesters-turned-rioters did not look favorably upon her business when they swept the area.

She tweeted out on Saturday, saying “the crowd is extremely peaceful and groups and many are wearing masks and trying to keep distance.”

It was only a few short hours later that Tauss tweeted again about the protests. This time her tone was difference.

I went into the hallway. I heard someone l enter the office and what sounded like smashing inside. We are a small newspaper with a handful of desktops. I’m now hiding in the basement.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) shared an infographic on Saturday via Instagram with guidance for protesters, which she entitled “PROTESTING SAFELY,” including a warning of “white supremacists” who “may be infiltrating these protests.” Her recommendation came during ongoing demonstrations, protests, and riots in several cities following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Well, we had some protests here as well. Quite peaceful though, and the main reason why is that those who want to protest know people won’t tolerate such shenanigans in areas outside of metro Kansas City & St Louis.

Rioters took to the streets in 17 states to exact violent revenge on businesses, government buildings, and even members of the media as frustration over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis boiled over late Friday night.

Hours earlier, Officer Derek Chauvin, the man seen with his knee on Floyd’s neck in a bystander’s video, was arrested and charged with the murder.

The violence across America was set against the backdrop of a long national quarantine that has made tens of millions of Americans jobless, and a pandemic that has left more than 100,000 dead. It took approximately four days of protests for Minnesota authorities to place Chauvin under arrest, and by then, civil unrest had hit a peak in the city of Minneapolis.

On Friday, it spilled across the country.

In Atlanta, protesters set fire to a police vehicle, looted the College Football Hall of Fame, attacked the CNN Headquarters and attempted to gain entry to a mall, AJC reported. Someone also reportedly shot at an officer in a police car

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday welcomed peaceful mass protests in the Big Apple over the police-involved death of George Floyd — even as he has staunchly barred other demonstrations, religious gatherings and fined small businesses $1,000 for reopening.

“I want to just say anyone who wants to protest, we’re going to protect your right to protest, but please also respect [that] the cop in front of you did not create the problem,” de Blasio said on WNYC radio’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.”

He was referring to the hundreds of activists who gathered in Lower Manhattan Thursday — in violation of the city’s pandemic lockdown rules — in the latest national demonstration sparked in the days since a handcuffed Floyd, who was black, died after a white police officer held him to the ground with a knee to his neck in Minneapolis.

While many protesters in the city wore protective face masks, they largely flouted social-distancing rules.

Over 70 demonstrators were arrested including for criminal possession of a weapon and assaulting officers.

De Blasio urged the NYPD to go easy on the activists.

“I want to see a light touch because people are undeniably angry for a reason,” he said.

De Blasio said nothing about the demonstrators violating city and state rules against large gatherings, even though he insisted earlier this month that rallies “spread the disease and help kill people.”

At the time, Blasio said gatherings, including the small reopen protest, are prohibited.

“We’re not allowing any kind of gathering, period,” the mayor said at a press briefing.

“I don’t care if it’s 20 people or a hundred people or a thousand people, it’s not going to be allowed. So the point is, if you gather, NYPD is coming there to give you a summons and if you resist, to arrest you, period, across all communities.

More and more it appears that Justice Roberts has taken the place of Justice Kennedy as the new ‘squish’ on the court. This does not bode well for any of the 2nd amendment cases awaiting a decision on whether to hear them or not, and probably is the reason that the court keeps kicking them down the road until Ginsburg or another of the Justices who are superannuated or suffering from chronic illnesses decided to retire, or simply doesn’t wake up one morning.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal by a California church that challenged state limits on attendance at worship services that have been imposed to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Over the dissent of the four more conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberals in turning away a request from the South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, California, in the San Diego area.

The church argued that limits on how many people can attend their services violate constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and had been seeking an order in time for services on Sunday. The church said it has crowds of 200 to 300 people for its services.

Roberts wrote in brief opinion that the restriction allowing churches to reopen at 25% of their capacity, with no more than 100 worshipers at a time, “appear consistent” with the First Amendment. Roberts said similar or more severe limits apply to concerts, movies and sporting events “where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in dissent that the restriction “discriminates against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses. Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.” Kavanaugh pointed to supermarkets, restaurants, hair salons, cannabis dispensaries and other businesses that are not subject to the same restrictions.

Lower courts in California had previously turned down the churches’ requests.

The court also rejected an appeal from two churches in the Chicago area that objected to Gov. Jay Pritzker’s limit of 10 worshipers at religious services. Before the court acted, Pritzker modified the restrictions to allow for up to 100 people at a time. (so moot, so ‘whatever’ ed.) There were no recorded dissents.

6 days ago as of this post, a former Moms Demand Action/Orange wave PA backed candidate for the Pennsylvania house threatened to shoot people who don’t wear masks in public (thinking the 2nd amendment gives her that right). Well, this time, a vocal supporter of the Sandy Hook Promise murdered two people in cold blood:

Willington, Connecticut — The search for a 23-year-old University of Connecticut senior suspected in two slayings and believed to be armed with several stolen guns stretched from Connecticut to New Jersey and Pennsylvania and continued on Monday, authorities said. Connecticut troopers said Peter Manfredonia, suspected in a deadly assault in Willington on Friday and a homicide in Derby, Connecticut, on Sunday morning is believed to be armed with several weapons stolen during a home invasion.

Double murder and in possession of stolen guns. More on the suspect at large:

These anti-gun extremists are not mentally well. Considering this guy stole guns from his victims (just like Adam Lanza stole guns from his mom to commit the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting), there MIGHT be a copycat syndrome in play here, which makes the Sandy Hook Promise commercial extra sick.

We pray for the victims of this sick person’s actions and for the pain that their surviving friends and family have to endure because of what happened in the senseless incident(s).

“….I think that the dangerous – you know – edges here are that he’s trying to undermine the media. Trying to make up his own facts. And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think.And that is the, that is our job.”

Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and on Thursday he shared a very hot take via the Washington Post. Republicans are evangelicals, right? And evangelicals believe in an afterlife. And because they believe in an afterlife, they deliberately do things that will shorten their lives, like partially reopening some parts of the country that aren’t COVID-19 hotspots.

Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals. https://t.co/ppo2bwiVGn